The Advice Columnist We Deserve

If you’re looking for straightforward advice, Cheryl Strayed—a.k.a. Dear Sugar, whose much loved columns from the Web site The Rumpus have been collected in a new book, “Tiny Beautiful Things,” is not the person to turn to. She will call you a “warrior” or even a “sweet arrogant beautiful crazy talented tortured rising star glowbug,” which may or may not make you feel better. She will offer you anecdotes—some harrowing, some charming—from her own life, but she is unlikely to tell you what to do. And this is precisely what makes her columns so appealing. Strayed is the Internet’s greatest relief from itself. The Internet is like an overly garrulous friend—entertaining and inattentive, carrying on regardless of who’s around. Strayed, in turn, has made a career from listening. Her column recognizes that giving advice is often futile. Instead, she offers her empathy.

Advice columnists are not therapists or pastors. They are performers, and the traditional advice column was designed to be playful. There was no telling whether “End of the Line” or “Losing It” were the melancholic people they claimed to be, or if they were pranksters, or editors making backhanded assignments; the columns were often written by a rotating staff, rather than the character with whom they were associated. The advice columnist emerged as a figure who wrote mainly for female audiences and encouraged propriety, manners, and practicality. But the emergence of feminism made the questions, and the answers, more complicated. Women stopped thinking about how they should do something—cook a meal, prepare for a holiday—and started considering why they did so at all. Columnists became the arbitrary authors of social rules, helping readers decide what was required of them. People once consulted advice columns when they wanted a broad, seemingly omniscient perspective, when they wanted to break out of their small network and take comfort in the notion that their problems were universal. But if Strayed’s popularity is any indication, readers today are hungering for something more intimate.

The earliest advice column appeared in the Athenian Mercury in 1691. Most of questions concerned comportment (could a unmarried couple live together?) or trivial queries (“Why a Horse with round Fundament emits a square Excrement?”). In 1693, the Mercury launched a sister paper, the Ladies Mercury, which included an advice column called “Love Etc,” which was advertised as a forum where women could ask relationship questions and receive answers that respected “the Zeal and Softness becoming to the Sex.” The columnist’s tone was arch, knowing, and chatty. The implication was that women hadn’t much to fret about—etiquette, hostessing—and that none of their questions would be ill fitted for a public forum.

A precursor to Dear Sugar was Elizabeth M. Gilmer, who took mild-mannered questions from her female readers and churned out thorough and philosophical responses. Between 1896 and 1950, Gilmer wrote a widely read column for the Times Picayune and The New York Journal under the pen name Dorothy Dix. Gilmer was a theatre critic, crime reporter, and fiction writer before she became an advice-giver. Her columns, sometimes known as “sermonettes,” would be classified today as pop psychology. She often gave them ambitious titles, like “Are You Good Company to Yourself?,” “Keeping Young,” and “Our Lives Are What We Make of Them.” Her advice went beyond the people who wrote to her; she had plenty of suggestions for the rest of society, too. Unlike later advice-givers like Dear Abby or Emily Post, she encouraged readers to reconsider, rather than follow, social codes.

Dix made no attempt to mask her feminist beliefs. She once wrote a column called “The Ordinary Woman” that urged readers to attribute greater value to domestic work. “Women who are toiling over cooking-stoves, slaving at sewing-machines, pinching and economizing to educate and cultivate their children…. the Ordinary Woman is the real heroine of life,” she wrote. Dix, who participated in the suffrage movement, encouraged women to work outside of the home and urged couples not to “degrade marriage into a kind of vaudeville show, where the wife is doing a continuous performance, and the husband is an audience of one, who may get bored at any moment and get up and leave.” Dix was by no means a radical—she was a stickler for ladylike manners—but she believed in her ability to influence social conventions and amend the status quo from within the system, and, in doing so, she articulated a framework for later feminist movements.

While Dix’s correspondents seem legitimately confused, they sought her counsel about things with which they were intimately familiar—their homes, their social circles. The people who wrote to Dear Abby in the sixties and seventies, by contrast, were terrified. Their children are gay; everyone seems to be getting divorced. Dear Abby was so widely syndicated at the time that her column became eponymous with genre. Her trademark was snappy, instructive one-liners: “Three strikes and a man is out, no matter how good his pitches,” she told Three Time Loser, a woman wondering whether she should get back together with her ex-husband. “Sometimes good luck comes disguised as disaster,” she counselled Alone and Crying. “Snoring is the sweetest music this side of heaven. Ask any widow.” Her advice was a reminder of what was expected of her readers: to buck up, dry their eyes, respect their commitments.

Many wrote to Dear Abby with the kind of easily sated curiosities that we now only reveal to Google: “Will you please tell me where, when, and how the toilet came to be known as a john?” or “Is there anything in insecticides that can excite a man?” After Abby published a letter, other readers would chime in, contradicting or elaborating on her advice. There were long trains of conversation about snoring husbands and how to act around your husband’s new wife. Abby’s column was an opportunity to see your name in print, for readers to become writers and vice versa. She offered an anonymous venue for sharing information—much like a comments section on a Web site.

Dear Abby’s advice changed as social norms did. In 1956, when she first started the column, she instructed women to avoid divorce at all costs; by the late eighties, she began, in extreme cases, to encourage it. She strove to be objective, to speak for the consensus. Abby preached acceptance—of your gay daughter or your cross-dressing brother—partly because forgiveness was more efficient than the alternative. She was an expert at dismissing dangerous feelings. Or as Nathanael West writes in “Miss Lonelyhearts,” a novel about a disgruntled male advice columnist who writes under the titular pseudonym, “Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily.”

Strayed, on the other hand, is an aficionado of dangerous feelings, a glutton for experience, and she offers patience and recognition. She makes no effort to appear omniscient or objective. She says “I’m sorry” a lot and offers her condolences in lyrical prose. “How painful. I’m sorry this happened to you,” she told Mourning and Raging, whose husband had cheated on her. “Though we live in a time and place and culture that tries to tell us otherwise, suffering is what happens when truly horrible things happen to us,” Strayed wrote in another column. She is just as entertaining as Dear Abby—her columns are profane and funny—but she is far more genuine. She is earnest without being too cloying.

Thousands of people write to Strayed seeking not her advice but her attention. She received a letter early on in her tenure that went, “WTF, WTF, WTF? I’m asking this question as it applies to everything everyday. Best, WTF.” And then other letters like it—vague, existential pleas for Strayed’s companionship—started flowing in. “I don’t have a definite question for you. I’m a sad, angry man whose son died. I want him back. That’s all I ask for and it’s not a question,” one reader wrote, in a letter that went on for pages. Strayed’s audience seems to have an appetite for seriousness that Dix and Abby’s lacked. She has both male and female readers, but their questions recall what Betty Friedan, in the “The Feminine Mystique,” called “the problem that has no name.” Friedan wrote about the “strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction” among American housewives in the fifties who spent too much of their days alone. Strayed’s readers have trouble naming what plagues them. They are self-centered enough to think that their problems merit attention, but too shy or unpracticed to ask the right questions. They seem atomized, listless, and chronically lonely.

Sometimes Strayed’s readers sign their full names at the end of their letters. Anonymity is a longtime staple of the advice column, a way of protecting the reader from embarrassment and protecting the columnist from becoming too invested in her readers’ troubles. But Strayed doesn’t seem to mind this breach in contract. She wrote her column anonymously for a time, but outed herself last spring, in part to direct the column’s devoted readers to her memoir, “Wild,” which has been on the best-seller list for more than twenty weeks. But from the beginning, Strayed was never too concerned about maintaining her anonymity. Her columns drew upon personal stories that she had written about in previously published essays. While Strayed writes from a place of comfort—married with two children, a thriving career—she has only recently arrived there. At forty-two, she had yet to pay back her student loans; she cheated rabidly on her first husband; her mother died when she was in her twenties; she was sexually abused by her grandfather. She offers up these sorrows to see what others might glean from them. Her comfort with her own imperfection is a small example of feminism’s accomplishments; she is a reminder that anyone with a troubled past could one day become a voice of authority.

Strayed has recommended therapy to a reader or two, but there’s a sense that people are writing because they feel they need her, that without her there is only anonymity and indifference. This is related to any number of social ills—our disillusionment with organized religion, the far-flung reality of most American families, the isolation that the Internet permits. The Internet invites you to count your followers and your friends; it privileges the breadth of your social network as opposed to the depth of those connections. Intimacies can be found in the anonymous corners of chat rooms, but those exchanges are colored by the fact that you might be pouring out your heart to a twelve-year-old or a robot. Why, then, not turn to Strayed? She is a real human being, laying herself bare, and encouraging others to do the same.

Photograph by Joni Kabana.

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